> most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming
Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Farming isn't an obvious idea at all if hunting and gathering is all you've done your whole life.
Maybe it is. If you gather seeds, some of them will get spilled or partially spoiled and thrown out. Some of these will grow, so it will be pretty obvious that humans can scatter seeds which will grow and can be gathered. That's farming.
The point is there's a huge difference between knowing that manually sowing and harvesting crops is possible, maybe even small scale incidental agriculture such as sowing seeds at a site and returning to harvest it months later, and choosing to settle permanently and thoroughly adapt your lifestyle around it. Maybe they knew it was possible for thousands of years, or even more, but only chose to do it in a systematic way when they ran out of other options.
I disagree. A lot of "simple" ideas we take for granted today evolved over thousands of years. The wheel, for example, took a lot of time to appear, place value is a notion we take for granted today but it became widespread only a couple hundred years ago, also whether zero was a number had been heavily debated around the time of its invention.
Making wheels used to be labour intensive and difficult, and even then remained quite inefficient. Wheels suddenly became energy efficient when the ball bearing was invented in the late 18th century.
Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Farming isn't an obvious idea at all if hunting and gathering is all you've done your whole life.